


Take a picture, it'll last forever

by musicanova



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Fluff, I know it says mature but it's not like, Peggy is a High School Teacher, that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-26 22:45:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18726370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicanova/pseuds/musicanova
Summary: Peggy'snottrying to flirt with the pretty waitress, she swears. She'd like to be, sure, but she has a very pressing matter at hand.(Or, Peggy uses a stock photo of Angie in a Powerpoint presentation, then meets her that same afternoon.)





	Take a picture, it'll last forever

**Author's Note:**

> This fic's been a super long time in the making! I've spent four years looking for the right situation to write these two in... But now here it is! Right in time for post-Endgame emotions. 
> 
> I haven't properly proofread this, as is the norm for me (oops) but I still hope you enjoy it!

**** The morning is hectic for Peggy Carter. Sleeping through three of her alarms aside, she forgot to stock up on cereal so she’s running on no breakfast, she can’t use the toilet because her neighbour shut off the water (don’t ask her why she thought living in a town house would be a good idea — _yes_ , she was taken by how pretty the house was and bought it on a whim _don’t_ judge her), there’s construction work on the one and only street she can take to get to school, and to top it all off she has a massive ladder in her stockings that she _just_ spent ten minutes yesterday scolding her students about. 

It’s chilly, enough that Peggy can’t just take off her laddered stockings and bear the cold, and it’s with one last grunt that God decides it should also start raining. At least, Peggy thinks, the powerpoint presentation she made for her afternoon class on tax evasion is, if she might say so herself, visually stunning, captivating _and_ informative. 

Except that it’s not, because when she arrives at school, she finds that the file is corrupt, her USB has also downgraded itself into a plastic stick of uselessness (thank you, rain), and Peggy has nothing but her charming voice and good looks to keep her students’ attention. Which, she notes with much disdain, is not entirely too hard thanks to teenagers being horrifyingly horny, but Peggy really would rather her students being engaged because of how brilliant her teaching was, not because of her boobs. 

Now don’t get Peggy wrong, she loves her boobs. The left one, being ever marginally larger, is Madame, and the right one is Mademoiselle, and they keep her good company when she’s eating cookies but wants to turn the page of her book. She would, however, prefer that her students loved her boobs less than she did. 

It’s with a certain kind of resignation that Peggy takes the fact that she’s not a home room teacher as a blessing and fires up Microsoft Powerpoint to make a new presentation for the afternoon. Maybe they’ll still be looking at her boobs, maybe they won’t. 

 

•••

 

It goes well in the end. Peggy can’t say that she’s as proud of the impromptu slides in the same way she was with the ones she’d prepared at home, but they’re something, and the students laughed appropriately every now and again at her choice of stock photos. It tells her that maybe she should be putting them in her slides every now and again just for the fun of it, however ridiculous and unrelated some of them may be. 

It’s not all hunky dory at that, though. Of course it isn’t. 

As it turns out, the rain from earlier in the day has turned into a hail storm (the first one in six years in this town, to be exact, because that’s just how the world works on shitty days) and she watched a student blatantly steal her umbrella from the corner of the room when she dismissed her class. By the time she’d registered what she’d saw though, it was too late to chase after him and reprimand him for his sins. 

Which is how Peggy finds herself shelter hopping between awnings, shivering and desperate for something to turn her day around. It’s when she stumbles across an old diner she used to frequent that her face lights up, and she pushes the door open to the familiar smell she used to love as a high school student. 

Truthfully, it’s a little more… dingy looking than she remembers, but she can’t tell if it’s because the diner’s aged or because her memories have given the place a little bit of extra sparkle to the edges. Either way she’s glad she stumbled upon it again, because she knows this is just the thing she needs. 

“Hello,” she greets the worker at the cash register who responds with a strange grunt, “could I grab a Reuben and a strawberry milkshake?” 

“Good choice,” the worker smiles, although Peggy can’t tell if it’s genuine. “ That’ll be $4.20.” 

Peggy resists the urge to let out a chuckle. She’s a school teacher for Christ’s sake, she can’t be laughing at lowly things like this. 

“And would you like your sandwich toasted?” 

So maybe Peggy can’t let go of her youth sometimes. Whatever. Just sue her for what she does next, she doesn’t care. _Let her live._

“Yeah, just blaze it.” 

There’s a beat of silence there, followed by an acute snort from somewhere towards the kitchen, and Peggy gives the cashier her biggest innocent smile that says ‘I don’t know meme references, I’m a school teacher who do you take me for?’ which would be a lot more convincing if she hadn’t just blurted out “blaze it” in response to 420 so easily. 

After paying, she saunters off to a corner booth and settles down, still trying to keep up the façade that her weed reference was an accident, and she flips open a notebook to start planning out her class material for next week. 

She’s half way through Tuesday when a waitress comes over with her order, and Peggy gives the girl a small smile. She places the plate before Peggy, but as she spins on her heel to return to her other duties Peggy can’t help but stop her. 

“Sorry, have I seen you somewhere before?” she asks. 

The waitress (Angie, her name tag reads, although it’s such a horrifically loopy font that the girl’s name could be Vwingle) gives Peggy a pointed look paired with an exasperated sigh and talks as she walks back to the counter. 

“You’re not getting my number, I’m afraid,” she says, trying to be as polite as she can although it’s incredibly strained. 

She can’t say she’s surprised by this response. Vwingle is incredibly pretty, curls angelic and pink lipstick perfect. There’s no doubt in Peggy’s mind that numerous men, undoubtedly with naïve wives awaiting them at home, have tried a line such as hers on Vwingle.

“No I really feel like I’ve met you before,” Peggy pushes on. She isn’t lying, anyway. 

Unease passes the girl’s face, and Peggy’s about to drop the topic and leave her be when it hits her why her waitress seems so familiar. For a moment she’d thought perhaps they went to the same university, or maybe even that they lived in the same neighbourhood, but the waitress’s face is so fresh in her mind. 

“You’re from my powerpoint this morning.”

“I beg your pardon?” Angie says, footsteps fast as she closes the distance between them again so that she’s standing before Peggy. 

“I used you this morning in my presentation. I distinctly remember your right eye behind the magnifying glass.” 

Much to Peggy’s surprise, Angie dissolves into a fit of giggles, and it’s not long after that she has a hand resting on the back of the booth seating to keep herself upright as she laughs her lungs out. 

By some twist of fate that isn’t sick for once in her life (thank you, God, _finally_ ) Peggy finds herself sitting across from Angie that night, wine glass in hand. 

She finds out that the girl is an aspiring actress, as is perhaps every pretty waiter in this town, who fell into stock photo modelling when her stripper friend seduced a hot shot stock photographer one night and took him home. Or something. It’s a very elusive tale told in definitely-not-chronological-order: Peggy finds that Angie is not the most talented storyteller. 

In return, Peggy retells a time she caught two boys shamelessly pleasuring themselves against a window of an art classroom. 

“I regret having such good eyesight,” she bemoans, “and I regret having such a sturdy moral compass. I couldn’t just let them ruin Stevie’s classroom.” 

“And? What did you do?” Angie asks, eyes wide. 

“In hindsight, I should have slammed the classroom door open when I went to confront them.”

Angie gawps. It hits Peggy then and there that a first date(?) is probably not the situation to be telling this story. But her audience is captivated, so what can she do? 

“I don’t know what I was thinking, but anything would have been better than getting a seventeen-year-old’s… release, shall we call it, on my skirt. Also would’ve liked to not have to tell them that a school classroom was an inappropriate place to do anal, but we can’t have everything in life.”

At the end of the night, Angie gives Peggy her phone number, leaves a faint, pink mark on her cheek, and waves goodbye as she skips away. 

There’s a sinking feeling in Peggy’s stomach that tells her scoring a possible girlfriend over stories about students having sex in school classrooms is not a good thing, but it’s happened, and there’s nothing Peggy can do about it. 

(Or rather, nothing Peggy wants to do about it.)

 

•••

 

It’s around eight weeks of Peggy finding obscure stock photos of Angie and discreetly putting them into her powerpoint slides before the woman herself appears at her classroom door. 

“I have an urgent matter,” she announces as she barges in mid-class with the principal on her heels. 

“Ms. Martinelli, you are not authorised to roam this building without-“ the principal tries for what Peggy will assume is around the fifth time, but it falls on deaf ears. 

“Angie, I’m kind of in the middle of teaching at the moment,” she says, voice wavering as she hopes the girl doesn’t notice the fact that she’s literally projected on the screen behind her right _right_ now. 

“But baby this is an emergency!” she whines back, arms flailing, and Peggy has to resist the urge to slap a hand across the girl’s mouth, because a room full of students that she has to see five days a week for majority of the year is _not_ the audience she wants for the first time Angie calls her a pet name that isn’t frickin’ Pegsy Legsy. 

It is perhaps this, that makes her cave. Not because Angie calling her baby makes her weak in the knees (it does), but because she isn’t particularly fond of the idea of having to face her students and continue teaching after having been called baby. And by the woman who’s posing on her powerpoint slide with a calculator, no less. So she assigns homework, sends the principal an apologetic smile, and books it out of the school before she can get fired.

With how antsy Angie is, Peggy expects the urgent matter to be something important, something big. Like “my house is on fire” or “my dog’s dying” or “I got fired”. Just anything that isn’t “so I’ve prepared a date”, paired with a nervous little smile.

It’s cute, she supposes, if she can ignore the fact that she literally might lose her job over this.

“Come on, baby. You’re gonna love it, I promise.” 

 

•••

 

Peggy doesn’t lose her job, although at this point she’s pretty sure she wants to. 

Her students won’t stop teasing and cooing at her every time there’s a stock photo in any of her slides (“Ooh Miss, are you embarrassed now, Miss? Is that why it’s not your girlfriend there anymore, Miss?”), and she’s earned a red strike next to her name in the eyes of the principal. 

The latter she shouldn’t be so concerned about, since she knows every other teacher has at least three for some completely benign reason (Rest in Peace Steve and the one time you missed a spot under your chin shaving), but somehow she can’t shake the feeling that the principal is watching her every move ever since The Incident. 

Even now, as she walks past the man’s office, she swears she can feel his eyes following her, waiting for her to trip, and so she runs the rest of the way to her car like she’s in some B-grade horror movie, scrambling into the vehicle in a desperate attempt to make a quick escape. 

With the doors locked and the key in the ignition, Peggy’s just about the reverse her car when there’s a tap on her shoulder that makes her jerk so hard that she rams herself into the centre of the steering wheel, car horn blasting throughout the staff carpark. 

When she whips her head around, hand break in her fist (she’s hoping she’s strong enough to just rip it right out of the car. She can do that, right? She goes to the gym three times a week that’ll work, right?), she finds familiar eyes blinking owlishly at her. 

“Angie?!” she screeches. 

Clearly stunned, the other girl remains silent, head slowly bowing down in shame. 

“I just wanted to surprise you,” she pouts, voice soft as she twists her fingers. 

“Well darling, you did that.” 

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that there’s students standing around, and it’s when Peggy spots the one guy who won’t stop asking about Angie during class that she decides it’s a good time to book it home. With careful fervour (or as careful as fervour can be, having met eyes with another student in the rear-view mirror) she stomps on the gas to make a speedy trip away. 

In her frazzled state, it takes until Peggy’s parked the car and turned it off to realise that she’s taken Angie to her own house. 

“Sorry I-“ she starts, “did you want me to take you home?” 

Angie gives her a soft smile then, one that she can’t quite read (actors, she swears to God) and opens her mouth to let out a breathy whisper. 

“I’m already home, Pegs.” 

It takes everything in Peggy to not just dive at Angie and do… indecent. Things. 

So instead, she opens the car door for Angie, leads her into the house, and does it in there instead. 

 

♡•♡•♡

 

“Where’d you get this from?” Angie asks, prodding at the bulky DSLR that’s sitting on the dining room table. 

“Impulse buy, I guess. There was a sale on at Sousa’s Camera House.”

“That’s bull,” Angie laughs, “you don’t do impulse buys.” 

Peggy sighs. 

“I guess you’re right,” she says, but she doesn’t elaborate any further. 

She can’t find it in herself to tell Angie the truth, so instead she continues to bustle around the house. Angie hangs around behind her like a pesky mosquito, clearly still trying to draw answers out of her, but Peggy stands her ground as she pulls out the vacuum in an attempt to drown out anything else Angie wants to say. 

So what if she bought an expensive camera just because she wants to take pictures of her girlfriend? Are you going to judge her for it? 

When Peggy feels Angie’s presence disappear from behind her, she turns the vacuum cleaner off and pads out to the living room. It’s just after she’s made a mess of the book shelf and is wondering what order to put the books in (by colour is a lovely sight but difficult to navigate, by height seems a little stupid because all of these books are unconventional sizes, but by author seems so boring) that she hears a click, and Peggy looks up to find Angie holding her camera, grin on her face. 

“Did I say you were allowed to use that?” Peggy asks, feigning annoyance. 

Angie shrugs. 

“Impulse, I guess.” 

 

**Author's Note:**

> (Oh also there's this funny prompt I found years ago that I can't find the link to anymore that's been used in here, which is the whole 420 sandwich thing, so credits to the person who came up with that sorry I can't find the source!)


End file.
